The Radicati Group, a marketing research development firm, predicted that the email marketing audience worldwide will increase from 2.42 billion persons in 2014 to 2.76 billion in 2017. At an already substantial number, there is still room to enlarge this field. Actively, there are over 3.2 billion email accounts, allowing an opportunity for growth of over half a billion users.
Businesses spend millions of dollars in marketing every year, if not billions. Recently, in the last year or so, 56 percent of businesses stated they planned to increase their use of email marketing. Rightly so. Taking your marketing online to the web, using emails as a marketing communication tool, can save money while increasing profit. Statistics gathered report that for every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average for a return amount on an email marketing investment. With 2.42 billion users, that is an opportunity for more than $106 billion in return for email investment potentially available.
Already there is a segment of businesses that gain 50 percent of their sales from email, according to a downloadable report from adestra.com, however unbelievable this may sound the segment consists of eight percent of businesses. While a growing 55 percent generate more than 10 percent of their sales from email. These numbers continue to increase.
Currently and quite obviously, email marketing is one of the most popular ways for consumers and businesses alike to gain information about one another. According to email marketing statistics from salesforce.com, 95 percent of online consumers use email, and 91 percent of consumers check that email at least once a day. That is a prime opportunity not only to convince a consumer to buy from you but to market your business in a way where you won’t have to convince anyone. They will come on their own.
Incidentally, with the rise of smart phone technology the rise of email users going mobile is comparable. Just for Gmail alone, 66 percent of their opens occur on a mobile device; this is lightly higher than the average of 48 percent of email opens from a mobile device. While this may change the email marketing game in terms of how emails are created and how information is displayed, it opens up a new possibility of reaching more people at an instantaneous rate.
Popular Email Marketing software GetResponse.com features numerous up-and-coming ways to partake in this gamut of email marketing opportunities including on mobile devices. Among their services, they offer downloads, articles and software including a landing page creator, a responsive email design, an A/B testing, an Autoresponders 2.0, an email creator, an email intelligence, a list booster, a form builder and an inbox preview.
Businesses must keep in mind it is essential to have highly versatile emails, allowing a consumer to click, swipe or tap on the information they want. A new wave of email marketing has begun including subject lines and emails that are new to a consumer’s inbox. Emails are sent out for when a consumer has abandoned his/her shopping cart, 20 percent of businesses do this. Personalized emails are sent out with the consumer’s name in the subject line or with words that draw attention like ‘alert,’ increasing the opens on these types of emails. Words like ‘newsletter’ are avoided due to tests that have proved this decreases clicks.
Tests have shown that even the number of characters within an email subject line has an effect on whether the consumer will open the email or not. Subject lines with four to 15 characters have an almost 16 percent open rate, while subject lines with more than 16 characters have less than two percent click rate.
When reading all of these statistics it may seem likely that most businesses may focus their marketing efforts online. It may be a smart decision on their part. Besides email marketing, there is online advertising, social media advertising (consisting of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), LinkedIn marketing, business blogs and SEO search optimization. The internet holds immense possibilities for a business, whether a big corporation or a start-up in a small community. It seems it would be unwise to miss out on the potential profit email marketing has to offer.
